The Opossum That Came To Visit
By Peter Menkin

This children's story is about an Opossum that lived under the porch
of a friend's home for a while. It is different from my usual poetry. I hope
you will like it.

Tilde was a girl opossum who lived under the back porch of the house at
the end of the road then a left turn into the drive a walk of 100 feet to
the steps that led to the front porch. She had been living there since
summer began. Tilde was a pretty opossum to other opossums and had a keen
sense of sight--for an opossum.

That’s what the cats that lived in the house said about her. They also
said that she was one of the homeliest creatures they’d ever set sights on
and in their conversations about Tilde, whom they liked to talk about since
she was new, they never once questioned where she came from or where she
might be going. For all intents and purposes Tilde was there and had set up
housekeeping.

One thing this meant, since Tilde liked a little snack now and then, was
she had nibbles available to her when the cats weren’t around. At night
Tilde left her cool spot under the porch, where she had a chair and a table
and a small radio which got most of the local stations and went out through
her front door at the side opening of the porch and right onto the roof of
her house, (the people in the house called her roof their back porch), where
she found a nice plate of nibbles that the cats had left. But Tilde wasn’t
always so lucky to find a full plate of nibbles.

The raccoons who lived around the house often came at night and in their
noisy raccoon way made quick eating of the nibbles. Tilde, who was an
opossum who liked things the way things should be, and that meant quiet and
under her control, especially on the roof of her own house, considered the
raccoons, fat things that they were, she often thought, a nuisance.

She planned to put out a jar of peanut butter, leave it for them to eat
during one of their greedy visits and relished the idea of their getting
peanut butter stuck to the roof of their mouths.

The idea of it brought an uproarious laugh to the whole area. But Tilde
didn’t care who heard her. She was willing to let it all hang out and it
felt good. “That will teach those raccoons to fool with my plate of nibbles
in the middle of the night,” she thought to herself. She almost hugged
herself with glee when she thought again about the peanut butter she was
going to set out for them.

“What’s the point of all this,” Tilde thought to herself, after she
considered putting out the peanut butter, while at the same time relishing
the idea of two fat raccoons licking the roof of their respective mouths and
wishing they had some water to wash away the peanut butter.

“What is the point,” she reminded herself assertively, for Tilde was an
assertive opossum. “The point is that this place where I live is a veritable
Garden of Eden, and the nibbles a part of the fig tree--fruit for her day.
It was in fact a favorite part of her day because at night she could venture
out and make a stop along her travels, which she liked to do, and between
looks at the moon have some nibbles. So Tilde decided to put up a sign, one
the raccoons could read. You can see a copy of the sign

Tilde put up on dirt path by the drive to the front steps of the house,
near the underneath way of the porch:

God is near. Rejoice in the evening and dance in the moonlight, wait for
the sun, and begin a good life, enjoy. Or something about peanut butter
warning. Or something about keep off the nibbles, and cryptic lettering of
ancient kinds, and kindnesses).

You probably can’t read it. Tilde knew what it said, and certainly the
raccoons knew what it said. When Tilde was writing for them she kept
thinking that maybe it would be better to make a similar, more direct
sign--something with a straightforward message like,

“Keep Off the Grass.” But, no that wouldn’t work, because the raccoons
never keep off grass anywhere if they want to walk on grass. In fact, in
Tilde’s first summer she’d heard the mice that lived in the house say that
the raccoons were perfectly happy to not only get on grass, but to dig up
grass. Of course there wasn’t any grass for digging up around the house,
except down by the creek. Nonetheless, this was getting off the subject and
if there was anything Tilde was good at it was getting off the subject. She
decided on the sign that you see when you go by the house near the drive.

We’re getting to the end of our story, so to make a long story short,
Tilde didn’t succeed in keeping the raccoons from the nibbles. But she did
succeed in making a very nice sign, which the raccoons commented on and
spent some time looking at.

In fact, the sign was the talk of the raccoon community, which she heard
when they started their usual pushing and shoving each other around. The
sign stood all summer long. And Tilde often had nibbles on her moonlight
walks, by the way.

After all, the raccoons left some. And no, she never did get around to
putting out the peanut butter so fortunately that part of her plan was just
a passing thought.